Collections: Photography

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Hank Willis Thomas

Patrick Amsellem on June 10, 2009

One major recent acquisition is Hank Willis Thomas’ series “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America.” The whole series consists of 82 images, two for each year from 1968 to 2008, and the acquisition includes half of the series: one image from each year the series covers. The work appropriates print advertisement from 1968 to the present that targeted a black audience or featured black subjects. From the original ads, Hank Willis Thomas digitally removed all textual components as well as logos. The remaining figures and scenarios are often both captivating and perplexing, as the artist seeks to disclose the visual strategies of advertisers and how these are based in cultural stereotypes. The images encourages the viewer to think about how marketing images construct and underpin stereotypes about African American life in a way that is often embraced by the consumer of both the image and the product. We are hoping to show this new work at the Museum sometime next year.

Hank Willis Thomas from Brooklyn Museum on Vimeo.

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Dash Snow

Patrick Amsellem on May 22, 2009

The Museum recently acquired some great new photography. Much of it will be on view this coming August when we open a new show with material from the Contemporary Collection.

In this delicate group of black and white photographs, Dash Snow captures his family and extended family of friends in an intimate and unguarded fashion. In a diaristic snapshot of Chinatown at night, a young woman (Snow’s wife Jade) sits in a doorway with the stroller on the sidewalk close by. Despondent, head in hand, or just tired after a long night out (Dash forgetting the house keys, or so the story goes), the mundane snap shot is full of emotion. Another image shows the couple’s baby daughter in bed sound asleep, humorously juxtaposed with the child-unfriendly traces of a parent’s night out. The poetic rendering of Jade’s naked back bears trace of an intimate encounter and a street portrait of a friend hints at the androgynity of adolescence. A refashioned old portrait of the artist’s grandmother adds glamour to the group while an intense self-portrait shows the bearded artist in profile, the whites of his wildly gazing eyes glowing against his mud covered face. Best known for his often candid Polaroid snapshots, Dash Snow has received much attention over the past few years. An elusive graffiti tagger turned visual artist and Whitney Biennial participant, Snow is part of a tightly knit group of downtown artists who turn life into art in the manner of artists such as Nan Goldin, Larry Clark or Wolfgang Tillmans.

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Sarah Baley

Patrick Amsellem on May 13, 2009

Sarah Baley’s show “Bois” opened at Collette Blanchard Gallery on the Lower East Side last Thursday night and we are very happy to have this image by Sarah in the collection.



Sarah Baley (American, born 1969).  Dug, 2005. From the series: Bois, 2009. Chromogenic print, 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm).  Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Artist, 2009.14.

Youth culture and sexuality have often influenced both fashion photography and contemporary art. The work of Sarah Baley, an emerging Brooklyn-based artist, is indebted to the confluence of interests and close dialogue between these worlds in the recent decade. Her series “Bois” is an exploration of a Brooklyn-based, lesbian community who identify as bois. Many in the group call themselves gender queer, which implies a rejection of the gender binary system and an embrace of sexuality as a sliding scale of possibilities. In Baley’s view, sexuality has become one of the few ways in which people can still express freedom. In this image, “Dug,” Baley placed her subject—staged her, dramatically lit—by the East River close to the Brooklyn Bridge. The evolving industrial urban landscape, reflected in the rapid development of Brooklyn’s waterfront, functions as a metaphor or mirror for the group’s fluid definition of sexuality and gender. This photograph will be included in an installation of contemporary art at the Museum this coming August and Sarah's show is on view at Collette Blanchard Gallery through June 17, 2009.

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